Saw a possible alternate ending in DVD wherein Casey Affleck gives a voice over saying he has done the wrong thing but I feel the way it is in the movie is great with a touch of ambiguity in it. The way the mother’s character was portrayed was brilliant.

The timelessness of Blade Runner is because of this – it has not been replicated (sorry couldn’t avoid it!). Some great movies have been replicated, remixed, updated and in some cases better versions made not necessarily as themselves though. For example, the energy of Pulp Fiction flows in a lot of recent movies. You know what I’m talking about – Lucky Number Slevin, Smoking Aces. So is the Coen Brothers’ style of plotting. Its all there. But Blade Runner has somehow been spared. Why? For some reason. Its tough to say if Alex Proyas (Dark City) or Christopher Nolan (admittedly in Batman Begins) were channeling Ridley Scott.

WTF? Why the hype such as from the makers of 40 year old Virgin and Knocked up, when those movie themselves are pretty ordinary if not bad? Movie is loaded with crap and it is also annoyingly long! Aspirin and loads of coffee recommended if you still want to watch it!

Guru was fantastic. An experience by itself. I’ve seen every Mani movie till this one, and have loved them all. Guru stood out amongst them in quite a few ways, which I found refreshing. Firstly, it wasn’t a feel-good tale, which brought with it an exciting prospect that Mani was going back to his days of hard-hitting cinema. The golden Nayakan and Dalapathi days. Second, the acting is always great in his movies, but there’s not been a movie yet where the protagonist stole Mani’s thunder, so as to speak. Abhishek Bachchan does just that. Out of the blue, we have this guy, who has been consistently terrible in almost every film he’s graced, deliver an absolutely fabulous performance that defines the whole movie!

Guru’s debate is very stimulating. It lets us decide if it was really wrong for Gurukant to bend the old, rigid laws and systems of this country to grow his business. Haven’t we all seen how difficult it is to climb up ‘corporate ladders’ or whatever they call it in bureaucratic India? It’s not hard to imagine what it would take a villager like Gurukant to grow to the level he eventually gets to.

The way to watch Guru right is to not make a judgment about it too early on. Not react to its content prematurely. So hold on to your horses, and wait till the very end of the movie to decide whether you agree with it or not. I did, and I agreed.

OK now I’m going to stop reviewing and get to more interesting stuff. Aspects of Guru reminded me other movies. Firstly, other Mani movies itself. Guru and Nanaji’s deep friendship and eventual rivalry reminded me of Iruvar’s Anandan and Thamizhchelvan. Even the way the people under them further the animosity by taking things into their hands (like the factory supervisor who employs goons to attack Mithun’s car). We see a similar situation in Iruvar too. Second, Guru and his stop-at-nothing-to-succeed attitude were reminiscent of Velu Nayakar and his ‘Naalu perukku nalladhu seyyardhu naa edhuvum thappu illa’ ideology. Third, ‘The Aviator’… enough said. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about.

While we aren’t watching ‘Memento’ for the 42nd time you would find us here. While we aren’t putting together the non-existent script in ‘POC: At World’s End’ you would find us here. While we aren’t saying lines from ‘Apocalypto’, (yes Apocalypto) you would find us here.

And while we are here, we are going to talk about what happened during the previous 3 sentences. Savvy?